Democrats: stop blaming each other -- you're all guilty


There is one thing worse than losing an election. It's losing your dignity, your credibility and your sense of responsibility.

Long before Republican Scott Brown was declared the victor in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate special election, Democrats turned on each other with an unseemliness that does not behoove a party that wants to hold power.

The truth is that everyone who is attacking someone else shares responsibility for this loss. This race was the Democrats' to lose, and they managed to lose it.

Democrat Martha Coakley and her campaign fell asleep while Brown was hustling from one end of the state to the other in his pickup truck. The Coakley crowd woke up too late. Her campaign pollsters and strategists failed to catch the movement of voters to Brown early enough to arrest the swing. They let Brown define the campaign.

The United States Senate should take a lot of blame for taking forever to pass a health-care bill. The Senate Finance Committee in particular delayed and delayed, failing to produce a bill before Congress' August recess. This allowed the raucous conservative protests to dominate the late summer news and prevented Congress from passing a bill this fall, which is when it should have been sent to the president. The longer Congress took, the worse the process looked. The ugliness of the process badly tarnished the bill itself. The excessive time consumed by health care prevented Congress from acting on other issues. And having still not passed it, Democrats now have to figure out how to get it done without that 60th Senate vote.


The Obama White House should have been keeping a watchful eye on this race, realizing the 60th Democratic vote in the Senate was at stake. More broadly, Obama also needed to create a national narrative that Democrats could proclaim with pride. The narrative has been missing, and conservatives have filled the vacuum. And, by the way, whoever sold the White House on claiming that under the stimulus bill unemployment would rise to only 8 percent last year and peak at 9 percent this year should be sent off on a long foreign trip.
There are other culprits, including the unpopular (and, in the case of some individual members, corrupt) Massachusetts legislature. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's low standing in the polls also hurt Coakley.

Why does the term "circular firing squad" seem to pop up after every Democratic defeat? Those Democrats whose mistakes led to this fiasco know who they are. If they don't take responsibility and instead just try to shift all the blame to someone else, they will prove themselves unprepared for the work they now have to do to get their party out of this hole.


By E.J. Dionne | January 19, 2010; 10:07 PM ET